


Terror in the Hen House

by Anefi



Series: Stiles Stilinski, Psychic Investigator [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: (not honeybees), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Evil Bees, Future Fic, Gen, Magical Stiles Stilinski, having a bad day just trying to help: the Derek Hale story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-13 16:21:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10517403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anefi/pseuds/Anefi
Summary: “Derek Makes a Friend”Derek does not make a friend.





	

“Hi, Mrs. Jameson!” Stiles called out as the door next to the buzzer he’d been poking at swung open to reveal a matronly woman with clip-on earrings and tortoiseshell glasses hanging on a cord around her neck. “I’m Stiles, we spoke on the phone, and this is…” he flourished a hand at Derek with a calculating look that had Derek rolling his eyes pre-emptively. “Moonbeam Honeyflower,” Stiles finished decisively. It won him a confused but indulgent smile from Mrs. Jameson. She had been Derek’s third grade teacher, and Stiles was the Sheriff’s son. She knew both of them. Beacon Hills was not a large town.

“Stiles, of course,” she said with a smile as she welcomed them in. “And...,” she looked at Derek, “So glad you’re here.”

Mrs. Jameson had contacted the agency (Stiles. She’d called Stiles. The ‘agency’ number was Stiles’s cell phone.) because she was very concerned that her house might have become haunted, or possessed, or otherwise home to one or more hostile incorporeal forces. Detailing the evidence she’d accumulated in support of this conclusion – mostly strange noises, some open cupboards, and one broken figurine – she ushered them into a living room with pastel walls and dark wood furniture housing an impressive assortment of ceramic chickens and one… Derek stared at it for several minutes trying to figure out how it was a chicken, but no, he was almost sure it was a pineapple. At least he could smell the likely source of the problem, if they were lucky. He leaned into Stiles during a lull in the small talk and muttered, “Squirrels in the walls.”

“Yes, I can feel the psychic traces of malevolent spirits very strongly here,” Stiles said, almost yelling. From the way he’d been squinting at a particularly demonic bug-eyed rooster figurine, Derek figured he was only half lying.

“I knew it,” Mrs. Jameson said, more… gleeful than most people might be when told they were indeed sharing living space with malevolent spirits. “My daughter said it was probably squirrels, but I could _feel_ there was something else,” she gave a significant look to Stiles and he nodded back seriously. “Is there anything you can do?”

Stiles grinned and started pacing out room on the floor. “Yes, not to worry, we see this kind of thing all the time,” he reassured loudly.  Mrs. Jameson told everyone she was hard of hearing, but Derek was pretty sure that she exaggerated the severity in order to overhear more gossip from unsuspecting townspeople. “I can perform a standard exorcism now, and we’ll come back in a few weeks to check up on you.” Stiles hefted an armchair and set it down in the kitchen, pointed at the couch, snapped his fingers. “Moonbeam, be a dear.” Derek glared at him but set it back against the wall to give them enough room to roll up the rug.

“You’re going to do a real circle?” he asked, low, when they were close on the floor.

“Might as well,” Stiles said with a shrug. “Never hurts.”

“Except that—”

“That was one time!” Stiles hissed. “ _Neither_ of us suspected the rabbit.”

“Just remember: protection first, _then_ reveal.”

Stiles paused and cocked his head. “Title of our sex tape?”

“More like an autobiography,” Derek countered, something warm in his chest at the passing thought of having an autobiography together, being so inextricably tangled that their lives couldn’t be teased apart. He shook his head at himself.

“No, c’mon, we can do better than that,” Stiles said.

“There’s the sex tape,” Derek said dryly. He smirked, Stiles snickered, and he would swear in court that he heard Mrs. Jameson stifle a laugh.

Derek took the bag handed to him and started pouring an outer circle of salt while Stiles dug through his bag until he found the grease pencil he was looking for. Pouring mountain ash or holly juice or, the worst, chili pepper in careful lines for rune work was something Stiles never had patience for, so he and Lydia had worked out refillable pens and custom-built pencils that suspended the materials needed in tacky or oily magic-neutral polymers. They were easy to clean up after, too, and there was steady demand through the Etsy shop of magic supplies that was Stiles’s primary source of income and had been since college. He had one employee to do most of the paperwork and mailing, all the non-magical work, someone he’d gone to high school with. Grenbarg? Derek could never remember.

Stiles started to sketch out runes with fast, sure strokes and waved a hand at Derek without looking up. “My colleague will need to walk around the outside and check for points of… spiritual ingress.”

“There may be some hammering,” he warned Mrs. Jameson, and escaped. He preferred not to leave Stiles while he was working, but the house was too warm inside and smelled like stale potpourri. After a careful circuit of the yard checking for anything out of the ordinary, he dug steel wool, plywood, and a hammer and nails out of the back of the jeep to block any gaps in the siding that squirrels had turned into a highway.

Any inroads near the foundation were easy to fix, but the flowerbeds were overwatered. By the time he finished stuffing steel wool into the third hole and nailing a board over it, Derek was muddy to both his knees from crawling in the dirt, with tears left in his shirt from the rose bushes even after the scratches healed. He scowled down at his jeans while the chant of Stiles’s improvised nonsense Latin rose and fell from inside. His shoes squelched as he took a step back to evaluate the last obstacle between him and being literally anywhere else. He wiped the caked mud off on the grass as best he could. There was one more suspicious hole, up high under the eaves of the gable. Derek didn’t want to bother finding a ladder, so he took a careful look around for witnesses and scaled the back porch up to the roof with an easy set of jumps and lifts. Lying flat against the shingles, half over the edge, he could just about reach the last gap with his arms outstretched, blood pounding in his ears from hanging upside down.

Unfortunately, he was too focused on doing the job and keeping his balance to take note of the dominant scents. Otherwise, he would have jumped down and left it alone. Maybe if Stiles hadn’t chosen that exact moment to add a very distinct _Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn_ to his typical patter, he could have still avoided it. But he didn’t notice, and his head was starting to hurt from being upside down, and Stiles made him laugh, and he reached his fingers into the chewed gap between wood planks to measure how much steel wool he’d need to plug it and—there was something moving, and something _crunched_ , and immediate pain in two fingers along with a _very angry_ buzzing. Derek almost fe— _jumped_ off the roof, but they were already starting to boil out and he knew his only chance at avoiding a full swarm was to go back to plan A, the steel wool. He shoved in as much as he could, tore a claw when it got stuck, and launched with a flip to the ground as bees started landing on and stinging at his arms and _face_ , fuck, _bees_ on his face, _fuck_ that. Derek ripped off his shirt over his head and sprinted from the house, into the woods that bordered the back lawn, and scrabbled through his hair to get the _bees_ out as he shuddered. Twenty minutes until his healing got the swelling down, probably, but he could still _feel_ them walking all over him with tiny clawed feet. _Ugh_.

As his skin stopped twitching and his horror receded enough to let in awareness of the world around him, he realized the extremely grating chittering he was hearing was actually coming from outside his head, and specifically, it was coming from a squirrel. A squirrel with one black ear and a few wisps of insulation such as might be found _inside a wall_ stuck to a burr at the base of its tail. If the _stupidest squirrel on the planet_ which was _the reason_ he still felt like his skin was crawling with _bee feet_ aggressively approached an apex _fucking_ predator, well. Derek’s hand shot out and closed around it.

His first instinct was to snap its neck. But. It would be a little cruel. Instead, he brought it up to his face and flashed his wolf eyes, as a warning. In retrospect, he probably should have predicted it would try to pee on him, beady black eyes vengeful as Derek grimaced and held it away from him. He looked to the sky, sighed, and let it go. It tore a chunk out of his hand and absconded, only to settle slightly further away – out of reach – and resume chittering at him, even louder than before. Derek glowered at it and leaned back against the nearest tree and waited for the welts to go down.

Stiles smiled at him from the armchair in the kitchen when Derek finally trudged back into the house, crunchy and disgusting with mud and blood but wearing a shirt again and – he was _fairly_ confident – free of bees. There was a plate of chocolate chip cookies in Stiles’s lap. Or, presumably, it had been a plate of cookies; there was only one left. “Moonbeam! Just in time,” Stiles said, eyes dancing. He picked up the last cookie and waved it in Derek’s direction. Derek reached for it, almost smiling, irritation melting a little bit in the face of Stiles’s small kindness and good cheer. “You can put the couch back,” Stiles said, and stuffed the entire cookie into his mouth.

“Wash your hands first, dear,” Mrs. Jameson said to Derek, with a disproving look at his clothes and shoes. Exactly like third grade.

 

### Epilogue:

In the Jeep on the way back to the loft, Stiles asked what happened, and laughed so hard he had to pull off to the side of the road when Derek told him. He brought over egg rolls every day for a week to apologize. The ceramic rooster did turn out to be possessed, and one of the hens—well. That’s another story.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry, Derek, bby, ilu. It won't always be this hard!


End file.
